Sunday, May 22, 2011

Cisco debuts 'private cloud' controller

Cisco shops can finally run a slew of branch office WLANs without having to put a controller at each site.

The company announced the Flex 7500 Series Cloud Controller at Interop last week, which centralizes control and management functions in the "private cloud" data center but allows for distributed data forwarding in local branch APs.

Connections and inter-AP fast-roaming capabilities stay up if there's a WAN failure between the branch site and the controller, and users can also authenticate locally, according to Greg Beach, director of product management in Cisco's wireless networking business unit